Chamber Works

Louise Talma's music shows a keen intellectual mind, but she also engages listeners at a visceral level and entertains them with her originality and quirkiness. She frequently combines motor energy, sometimes associated with Stravinsky, with a beautiful melancholy expression, and often creates moments of extraordinary beauty, such as in the Lullaby in Seven Episodes. She seems to have warmed to the precision of neoclassicism, the discipline of Boulanger's teaching, and French lightness of touch. While there are elements that could be connected to her time in Paris, her language is quite unique. Her output was substantial and covered a wide range of genres. She wrote numerous vocal works, both choral and solo, in which she set a great variety of texts, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Auden, John F. Kennedy and e. e. cummings. Her piano works embrace pieces for children, sonatas and the virtuoso Alleluia in Form of Toccata. Apart from Soundshots, all the works on this disc were written in the 1980s, when Louise Talma was in her late seventies and early eighties. Her maturity gives the music a rare, distilled quality. Her musical thinking has a very focused precision; textures are generally transparent; the atmosphere is at times ironic, strange, even bizarre, at others it has a deeply affecting sadness. The beauty of her slow music is exceptional. The Ambient Air, written in 1983 and scored for flute, violin, cello and piano, is in four movements, Echo Chamber, Driving Rain, Creeping Fog, and Shifting Winds. Much of Talma's music is descriptive, and here we have titles to tell us her thinking. It is appropriately evocative, and she creates striking pictures in sound. While the combination of a flute with a piano trio might suggest something light in effect, she uses the instrumental colors with great originality to paint very atmospheric musical illustrations. The first movement beautifully captures the creepy quality of an echo chamber. While the rain of the second is invigorating and energizing, it performs a sardonic dance in the middle. She captures, in the third, the amorphous and elusive nature of fog. With the unpredictable nature of wind, the fourth movement rocks, sways, blows and buffets.